Breaking through the radio barrier
It’s easy to record an album these days. The hard part is getting it played on the radio
The Cooper Brothers have a new album — now they want it to be heard,
It’s never been easier for musicians to record an album and never more difficult to get it to the ears of the buying public. Take Ottawa’s Cooper Brothers, a veteran country rock band with several North American hits to their credit and who have, according to numerous critics, just released one of the best — if not the best — album since their first in 1978.
Southbound was produced at Tragically Hip’s studio in Bath, Ont., by Colin Cripps, who has produced and written for Kathleen Edwards, Blue Rodeo, Junkhouse and Bryan Adams.
It cost the Coopers about $25,000 from their own pockets and investments — or “donations” as lead singer Brian Cooper calls them — from friends.
Excepting the CBC and a few smaller stations across the country, the Coopers are struggling to get tunes from Southbound played on radio, even in their hometown of Ottawa.
Their older hits, including The Dream Never Dies and Know Her When I See Her, still get airplay but as with many other artists, young and well established, making it onto conservative, niche-driven radio playlists with new material is next to impossible.
And if radio doesn’t play the music, distribution deals and good-paying gigs become more difficult to obtain, and a critical mass of people don’t buy because they don’t know the music exists.
The Coopers have hired Gerry Young, a Toronto-based independent “record plugger” who for 40 years has been lobbying radio stations to play music by client bands.
“It was looser back in the late ’70s,” says Young, “and a bit more of a cowboy atmosphere. You could chain yourself to a music director’s desk till he played the song, but those days are gone mainly because Bell Media, Astral, Rogers have basically taken over most of the radio stations. They have formats which generally come from Billboard Magazine or what’s happening in the States.”
The strict format guidelines leave little room for local input or innovation, says Young.
“Basically they can switch their top 20 songs around two places a week,” he says.
“So that’s two empty places and you know one of them is going automatically to Bruno Mars or Tyler Swift, Nickelback or Avril Lavigne. The research has been done to death and they’ve decided that people like to hear familiar tunes from familiar artists and that seven or eight people out of 10 would like to hear the same 20 songs over and over again.”
Young also manages nine bands and “tracks” airplay for half a dozen artists, including the Coopers.
Getting a new band played on radio is “almost impossible,” he says.
“I have no idea who’s programming CHEZ-FM,” says Young, “but he doesn’t have anything to do because he’s just playing classic gold. It’s the same with Q107 in Toronto. I said to them, ‘I know you’re a classic rock station, but isn’t there one hour a week you could devote to new rock material?’ They said, ‘No, we have no vehicle for that on this station.’ It’s unbelievable. It’s the biggest rock station in Canada’s biggest city.”
The result, figures Young, is that radio “is committing slow suicide” because people are turning elsewhere for their music.
“The Cooper Brothers’ album is a great album and when I sent to out to the radio stations I expected a flood of adds, especially at CKBY (Country 101) in Ottawa. The guy got back to me after a couple of weeks and said, ‘No, we’re taking a pass.’ I was totally pissed at that.”
Country 101 music director Joel Lamoureux says he’s a huge supporter of local musicians and denies that the Rogers-owned station — one of 55 in the corporate stable — follows corporate dictates in its music selections. He says all programming is done inhouse.
And there are fundamental criteria, he says, such as high production standards, so sound quality is the same across the board.
“There can’t be a dip in quality,” he says. “I can’t go on the radio and say this is a recording that hasn’t been produced quite as well because they are a local act. It has to be Nashville quality at all times.
“In music there’s a constant evolution,” adds Lamoureux. “What we play on the radio in 2013 might not be the same as it was in 2010. There’s a constant changing appetite. Country music is very youthful, very energetic, very guitar driven,” he says. “It’s not necessarily threechord country any more.”
Fickle formats have equalled radio silence for many new and established artists who back in the day were big stars.
Montreal rockers Jonas and the Massive Attraction had a huge, radio-propelled hit in Big Slice two years ago and although they are getting some airplay with their current single Ultimate Low, it doesn’t compare.
“Our latest single went top 20, but now it’s sliding because it didn’t get the radio support,” says Jonas manager Todd Littlefield. “Rock radio has changed drastically since 2011. They aren’t playing the same music. It’s more the Sheep Dogs and Monster Truck and those kinds of bands. It’s hippie rock that you barely heard in 2011.”
Despite rave reviews for his live show, Jonas has yet to get the traction outside Quebec that Littlefield expected. “It’s surprising he isn’t getting the radio play,” says Littlefield, “but that could change tomorrow.
Country 101 is the biggest country music station in eastern Ontario and, as such, extremely influential, especially for local musicians.
Lamoureux, who has his own daily show, won’t be drawn on exactly why he rejected the Southbound album, but says the Cooper Brothers have never contacted him to have that conversation.
“I would love to have them come in so we could listen to a couple of tracks together and I could explain some philosophies so they would better understand,” he says.
In common with most radio stations, Country 101 announcers, including Lamoureux, do not choose their own music. It is chosen by the station’s music director, working with a core top 40 songs.
Radio is no longer the powerful, career-boosting force it was, says CHEZ-FM music director Steve Colwill. “We’re in a fragmented media landscape with so many other platforms people are relying on,” he says. “For new or existing bands to think that radio airplay alone is going to be the ticket to success is a little dated. Success now is based as much on YouTube plays as it is on radio plays.”
(Adele and Arcade Fire both emerged and grew popular on the Internet.)
It’s a myth that play lists are corporately driven, agrees Colwill, who has been with CHEZ since the station was launched as Ottawa’s only all-rock FM station 36 years ago.
“We do not get a strategy or a play list sent to us from Toronto,” he says. “All radio stations find out what their audience likes and what they don’t like. It was different when there was no competition. You had a tremendous amount of latitude to play what you wanted.”
Band and song selection on CHEZ is 100-per-cent audience driven through surveys and other listener input, adds Colwill.
“CHEZ is classic rock and there is a spectrum of music that works for us and music we don’t think works for us,” he says. “The bulk of the audience we cater to, and the reason they come here, is not for new music. They know what they like and they like what they know.
(The three most popular bands among CHEZ listeners are Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and AC-DC.)
Radio has become a niche business operating in one of Canada’s most competitive business environments, adds Colwill.
“There are four stations in Ottawa that are essentially rock stations, plus others like Bob and Boom and Dawg that play a lot of rock,” he says. “So stations have a lot of well laid out strategies for attempting to be successful within the niche they had made for themselves.”
Former Bob FM morning show host Sandy Sharkey says she was presented with a music list every day featuring bands that made the list based on previous hits.
“So it’s a vicious circle,” she says. “In order to get airplay you have to be popular but how do you get popular if you don’t get airplay? They were songs that fitted our format and any station in the chain with our format would play those songs, and that would come from the mother ship, although there would be leeway here and there to play a local established band. Our format was geared to people who wanted to hear the songs they know and make them feel good. It’s what most radio stations do.”
Sharkey concedes she and her producer occasionally got tired of hearing some songs and would insert her own choices — “until we were told to cease and desist.”
Live 88.5 is an exception, as new music, comprising around 60 per cent of its playlists, is essentially its niche.
Station music director Noah Sabourin says he watches for new bands online and at festivals but is also open to unsolicited CDs.
“A lot of the bands we start playing are on the cusp of getting a record deal,” he says. “A couple of years ago I had a listener send me a YouTube link to the Gotye song Somebody That I Used to Know. It was just a good song so we just started playing it. So sometimes it’s listeners who send us tips.”
How long the new music lasts on the station’s playlist is down to listener reaction, adds Sabourin — “natural reaction, not just the band’s friends.”
“And there are other factors,” he says. “Are they building their story — touring, getting out of Ottawa and working hard. That way we know they might have some longevity. Eighty per cent of the new music we play is by new, unfamiliar bands with their first album. This discovering of new bands is what sets us apart.”
None of this is much comfort to the Cooper Brothers and other bands producing new music.
Dick Cooper says he feels badly for the good, upcoming musicians struggling to get noticed but concedes that many aren’t good enough to be worthy of radio play.
“Recording comes so easy to young bands,” he says.
“You can rehearse twice and record something without touring and without playing to the point where you’re really tight. Back in the day, the thing you worked all your life for was the recording deal. Going into a studio was like going into a cathedral. Now these kids are recording without earning it.” But not all is bleak. As with many musicians they have pockets of keen fans across the country inside and outside of radio stations.
Alberta is a good market for the band and they got recently a call from Gerry Young, who reported that a radio station in Glace Bay is all over Southbound.
“Gerry said, ‘You’re stars in Glace Bay, but unfortunately the only place to play is the Legion Hall’, laughs Dick Cooper. “I said it might come to that, Gerry … let’s look into it.”
The Cooper Brothers’ album, Southbound, is available on iTunes, CD Warehouse, Compact Music and will be available nationwide in early September.